WORK FORCE BLOG -- SCOTT SUTTELL

A lot of people who work in Cuyahoga County don't live there

Every day, more than 195,000 people who live outside Cuyahoga County commute to the county for work, according to this analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Census Bureau, as part of its new American Community Survey, found that about 27.4% of workers nationwide commute outside the county where they live. Cuyahoga County is just above that rate, at 27.7%.

Among workers in Cuyahoga County, 195,129 live outside the county, according to 2006-2010 estimates from the American Community Survey. Lorain County sends the most workers, 42,171, to Cuyahoga County, followed by 37,191 from Lake County and 35,883 from Summit County.

Meanwhile, the survey found, 59,317 residents of Cuyahoga County leave the county for work. The most popular destination, with 15,992 workers, is Summit County, followed by 13,334 to Lake County and 10,475 to Lorain County.

Here are some other tidbits from the survey:

In 2011, 80.3% of workers in Cuyahoga County drove to work alone, considerably higher than the 76.4% rate nationally.

Not surprisingly, then, just 8% Cuyahoga County workers carpooled in 2011; the national rate is 9.7%.

4.9% of all workers in Cuyahoga County used public transportation to get to their job, almost identical to the national rate of 5%.

0.4% of you bike to work, compared with 0.6% nationally.

In 2011, the average one-way commute to work for people living in Cuyahoga County was 23.7 minutes. The average commute nationally was 25.5 minutes.

4.2% of all workers here had a commute of 60 minutes or more in 2011, compared with 8.1% in the nation as a whole.

You can go here for more data about how Northeast Ohioans get to work.

This and that

Lip service: President Barack Obama has called for 5 million more community college graduates by the end of the decade to boost U.S. competitiveness.

Just one problem: Financial support from the federal and state governments is eroding.

“Since he took office in 2009, Obama has lavished attention on two-year schools; last year he visited 10 community college campuses,” Reuters reports. But the attention hasn't translated into more financial support.

The president won $2 billion for community college training programs when Democrats controlled Congress in 2009, but last year's $8 billion proposal went nowhere, Reuters says. Budget pressures also are leading to cuts in Pell grants, which help nearly half of all community college students pay tuition, according to the news service.

As a result, the American Institutes for Research reports, “the average annual community-college tuition rose by 41 percent, to $3,269, from 2000 to 2010. The average subsidy per student received by community colleges fell by 24 percent during that period, to $6,223 per year.”

Looking up: Cleveland-area chief information officers are in a pretty good mood when it comes to hiring IT staff in the second quarter of the year.

The just-released Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Forecast and Local Trend Report found that 12% of local CIOs plan to expand their IT teams in the April-June period, while just 4% plan reductions.

Meanwhile, 64% say they plan to hire only for open IT roles, and 20% are putting IT hiring plans on hold.

Tell us something we don't know: Corporate profits are galloping to new heights, but worker income is just limping along.

“As a percentage of national income, corporate profits stood at 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, the largest share at any time since 1950, while the portion of income that went to employees was 61.7 percent, near its lowest point since 1966,” The Times reports.

In recent years, “the shift has accelerated during the slow recovery that followed the financial crisis and ensuing recession of 2008 and 2009,” Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays, tells The Times.

The paper reports that corporate earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1% since the end of 2008, according to Mr. Maki, but disposable income inched ahead by 1.4% annually over the same period, after adjusting for inflation.

“There hasn't been a period in the last 50 years where these trends have been so pronounced,” Mr. Maki said.

“Globalization has pushed down the cost of labor available to multinational corporations; technology has allowed companies to make more with fewer workers, in general; and Big Finance has gobbled up the economy, as the banks' share of total corporate profits has tripled to about one-third since the middle of the last century,” the website reports.

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